The present invention relates to wireless communication networks and, more particularly to systems and methods for planning wireless communication networks.
Wireless communication networks such as wireless local area networks (LANs) may serve a multitude of client devices using multiple access points. The network planner seeks to have the network provide attributes such as ubiquitous coverage, high throughput, etc. Network parameters that may be adjusted in seeking to achieve these objectives include the transmission frequency and power of each access point. Finding an optimal set of network parameters for an even relatively modestly scaled network is a non-trivial problem. Consider, for example, an IEEE 802.11b network that includes 10 access points. Each access point can be assigned to one of three possible channels and one of six possible power levels. Thus each access point has 18 possible configurations. This network would therefore have 1810 or approximately 3.6 trillion possible configurations. An exhaustive search of each possible configuration would take an extremely long time considering that some sort of quality metric must be evaluated for each considered configuration.
What is needed are efficient systems and methods for searching through the large number of possible configurations in order to find a globally optimal radio plan. It is also desirable that the results be deterministic based on the inputs to facilitate testing and debugging. It is further desirable that the execution time be substantially deterministic. These desired deterministic attributes rule out genetics algorithms and annealing algorithms as known in the art.